After passing through this stretch of wood the miserable remains of Fonquevillers village were reached--another very "unhealthy" spot--on the far side of which the tramway to the trenches began. This most important adjunct to trench life was a very favourite target of the enemy. At the place where the tram-line started waggons and fatigue parties used to congregate after dark, to deliver and collect those various items of food and equipment which did so much to make life tolerable. Knowing this full well, the enemy used to open at intervals a concentrated fire on this spot, and woe betide the men that were gathered there at the moment. A series of blinding flashes and terrific explosions was the first warning that you got, and if the shelling was accurate it was at once the beginning and the end. As a matter of fact, however, we were extremely lucky. Not once did our rations get caught at this danger point. The track led along a glade through Gommecourt Park, once a fine wood of noble trees, now a shattered skeleton of blackened stumps and splintered branches looking gaunt and spectral. A wonderful place this wood had been when the Germans held it. Huge dug-outs were concealed beneath it, with many an underground passage and machine-gun posts cunningly concealed in steel trees which counterfeited most cleverly the surrounding trunks. No wonder the opening attack in 1916 found this place wellnigh impregnable. No wonder the French Government had put up huge notices that the park was preserved as a national memorial, albeit the notices that no work was to be undertaken here without permission of the French Government were now riddled with bullets and splintered with shrapnel. The tide of war had flowed up to Gommecourt Park once more. On either side of the track were endless pieces of trench and dug-outs, a very handy refuge in time of trouble; and it was with some slight sense of loneliness that you left the protection of these on the far side for a longish walk across the barest of bare open ground, heading for a lone bush which marked the line of direction to the British trenches. The frequent "whizz-bang" holes, some of very recent date, showed that the track was well known to the enemy. In every direction were compact woods of varying size and geometrical pattern. Biez, Pigeon, the more famous Rossignol Wood, were all distinctive features in the landscape; and by day one expected to see those fleecy white puffs suddenly appearing above them and gradually dissipating again into the air which marked the British shrapnel, or, again, the blacker and more ominous clouds of the German fire.